Recent Technological and Methodological Advances for the Investigation of Submarine Landslides

Abstract

Submarine landslides have attracted widespread attention, with the continuous development of ocean engineering. Due to the recent developments of in-situ investigation and modelling techniques of submarine landslides, significant improvements were achieved in the evolution studies on submarine landslides. The general characteristics of typical submarine landslides in the world are analyzed. Based on this, three stages of submarine landslide disaster evolution are proposed, namely, the submarine slope instability evolution stage, the large deformation landslide movement stage, and the stage of submarine landslide deposition. Given these three stages, the evolution process of submarine landslide disaster is revealed from the perspectives of in-situ investigation techniques, physical simulation, and numerical simulation methods, respectively. For long-term investigation of submarine landslides, an in-situ monitoring system with long-term service and multi-parameter collaborative observation deserves to be developed. The mechanism of submarine landslide evolution and the early warning factors need to be further studied by physical modelling experiments. The whole process of the numerical simulation of submarine landslides, from seabed instability to large deformation sliding to the impact on marine structures, and economizing the computational costs of models by advanced techniques such as parallel processing and GPU-accelerators, are the key development directions in numerical simulation. The current research deficiencies and future development directions in the subject of submarine landslides are proposed to provide a useful reference for the prediction and early warning of submarine landslide disasters.

Keywords

• submarine landslide
• in-situ investigation
• physical modelling
• numerical simulation